Centripetal Democracy
Democratic Legitimacy and Regional Integration in
Belgium, Switzerland and the European Union
Joseph Lacey
Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to
obtaining the degree of Doctor of Political and Social Sciences
of the European University Institute
European University Institute
Department of Political and Social Sciences
Centripetal Democracy
Democratic Legitimacy and Regional Integration in Belgium,
Switzerland and the European Union
Joseph Lacey
Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to
obtaining the degree of Doctor of Political and Social Sciences
of the European University Institute
Examining Board
Prof. Rainer Bauböck, EUI (Supervisor)
Prof. Philippe Van Parijs, UC Louvain (Co-supervisor)
Prof. Hanspeter Kriesi, EUI
Prof. Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University
© Joseph Lacey, 2015
No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior
permission of the author
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Contents
Acknowledgments v
List of Figures vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Abstract ix
Introduction
1
I Opening Remarks 3
II The Problematic 4
III Justifying the Comparative Approach 7
IV Overview of the Dissertation 10
Part One: Democratic Legitimacy and Centripetal Democracy
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Introduction to Part One 19
Chapter One: Democratic Process and Democratic Purpose –
In Pursuit of a Realistic Ideal 21
I A Realistic Democratic Ideal 21
II An Account of Democratic Process 24
On the Idea of a Voting Space 25
The Structure of Democratic Process 28
Equality, Competition and Inclusion 30
III Democratic Purpose and the Principles of Democratic Process 33
The Principle of Democratic Equality 36
The Democratic Difference Principle 37
The Principle of Maximum Voting Opportunities 41 IV Navigating Conceptual Oppositions and Contrasts in
Democratic Theory 44
Chapter Two – The Democratic Enactment of Representation 47
I Three Senses of Democracy and Representation 47
II Representation as Fact 50
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Political Representation 53
Democratic Representation 56
IV Representation as Democratic Value 63
The Virtues of Good Democratic Representation 63
Perversions of Democratic Purpose 68
V Centripetal Democracy 70
Conclusion to Part One 75
Part Two: Democratic Legitimacy in the EU
77
Introduction to Part Two 79
Chapter Three – Conceptually Mapping the EU 81
I The EU as a Political System 81
II Why Demoi-cracy? 85
III Demoi-cracy and the Meaning of Demos 91
IV Demoi-cracy: A Dual Compound Regime of Deep Diversity 94 Deep Diversity and Europe’s Community of Ignorance 95 Dual Compound Regime and European Governance 97
V The Demoi-demos Relationship 102
Chapter Four – A Democratic Assessment of a Demoicratic EU 105
I Five Hypotheses Concerning the Quality of EU Democracy 105 II The Impossibility, Undesirability and Satisfactory Nature of
European Democracy 107
The Impossibility of European Democracy 108
The Undesirability of European Democracy 108
The Satisfactory Nature of European Democracy 109
III Statespeoples Control in the EU 114
Statespeoples Control of Treaty-making 114
Statespeoples Control of the European Council and the Council 117
III Citizen Control in the EU 119
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Citizen Control of the EP 121
Technocracy, Collusion and Populism in the EU 124
IV The Public Sphere and the Role of Civil Society 125
Discursive Participation 125
Mobilisation 127
V The Democratic Deficit in Summary 130
Conclusion to Part Two 135
Part Three:
Testing the Lingua Franca Thesis –
Belgium and Switzerland Compared
137
Introduction to Part Three 139
Chapter Five - Belgium versus the Lingua Franca Thesis 143
I Validating the LFT? 143
II Political Community Formation in Belgium 144
Francophone Linguistic Dominance vs. Flemish Language Equality 145 Flemish Communalism vs. Francophone Regionalism 148 Francophone Federalism vs. Flemish Confederalism/Separatism 151
The Belgian Demos-demoi Relationship 153
III Consociationalism and Federalism in Belgium 155
IV Democracy in Belgium 157
The Belgian Voting Space Compound 158
Democratic Representation: Authorisation, Accountability and Gatekeeping 161 Consociationalism and Democratic Representation 163
Centripetal Democracy Foregone 166
V The LFT Confirmed? 169
Chapter Six – Switzerland versus the Lingua Franca Thesis 173
I Overcoming the LFT? 173
II Founding the Federal Confederation 174
From Confederation to Federation 174
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Pre-empting the Linguistic Cleavage 178
III Mono-national Switzerland and Competition in a
Consensus Democracy 181
The Swiss Demos-demoi Relationship 181
Representative and Direct Institutions of Democracy 184 IV Democratic Legitimacy and Centripetal Democracy in the
Land of Popular Votes 187
Direct Democracy in Question: A Swiss Reply to Critics 187
Swiss Democracy as Centripetal Democracy 198
V The LFT Defeated? 201
Conclusion to Part Three 203
Part Four: Conclusion
209
Chapter 7 – Modelling Centripetal Democracy for the EU 211
I Affirming the Comparison: Belgium, Switzerland and the EU 211
II A Realistic Demoi-cratic Ideal 213
Executive Formation and the European Party System 214
Direct Democracy: Primary Law 218
Direct Democracy: Secondary Law 221
III A New Representative Politics and the Maturation of the
European Public Sphere 226
Visible Power and Identity-formation in a Less Populist EU 226 The Possibilities of and Limitations to Discursive Integration in the EU 230 IV Democratic Legitimacy in the EU – a Likely Scenario? 233
V Are there Alternatives? 237
The Argument in Summary
243
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Acknowledgments
The oft recited cliché that “writing a PhD is a lonely road” has (mostly) rung hollow for me throughout these last four years. Reflecting back now on the many people involved, and those without whom the project could not have reached an acceptable condition, only serves to confirm this impression.
Rainer Bauböck, who has gone well beyond the call of duty in virtually every aspect in his role as supervisor of this dissertation, is heartily thanked. His extensive feedback on chapters as they were produced in the third and fourth years were just as crucial as his disciplined approach towards making sure the project was on solid foundations in the first and second years. Rainer’s willingness and enthusiasm to allow students great freedom in pursuing their own line of inquiry and in their own style is an approach that I have especially valued and from which I have directly benefited. Regular words of encouragement, much needed advice on non-dissertation affairs, and many other kindnesses won’t be forgotten.
These last thoughts are no less true for Philippe Van Parijs, who actively co-supervised this project from the third year onwards and made himself available for consultations of varying stripes – generosities for which I am particularly grateful given the many demands on his time from arenas both within and beyond academia. There is a much greater sharpness to the final product due to the tough challenges and helpful suggestions that came from Philippe, whose own work has helped shape the overarching theme of this project.
I also thank the other members of my jury, Hanspeter Kriesi and Nadia Urbinati. Hanspeter has been extremely kind with his time and a terrific interlocutor since joining the EUI in my second-year, especially in deepening my understanding of the Swiss case. These conversations, in addition to engaging with his work, have helped with many parts of the jigsaw. I am delighted Nadia has taken an interest in this project, given the important role her work has played in shaping my understanding of democracy as a normative and descriptive concept. For time dedicated and feedback on the final draft, I am very appreciative.
Alan Patten also deserves special mention, both for his willingness to serve as sponsor for a fruitful research stay at Princeton University’s Department of Politics and for his specific contribution to this dissertation in lengthy discussions over several chapters during my stay. This research period was sponsored by a Fulbright Schuman Award, an organisation to which I also extend my gratitude.
At the EUI, I benefited from many seminars and workshops, most importantly being those convened by Alexander H. Trechsel on the work of Peter Mair and Federalism and the EU. Coming from a background in philosophy, these courses were instrumental in getting me to better grips with some of the main political science literatures relevant to this project.
Although this dissertation benefited from a wide range of interlocutors at conferences, workshops and individual meetings I offer particular thanks to those who provided feedback on specific draft chapters and outlines. These include all of Rainer Bauböck’s supervisees over the period 2011-2015 in the context of PhD colloquia, especially those who served as in-depth discussants for my work: Leila Hadj-Abdou, Andrei Stavila, Bouke De Vries and Rutger Birnie. Other valued contributors elsewhere include Emilee Booth Chapman, Philip Pettit, Johannes Pollak, Michael Saward, Philippe Schmitter and Quentin Skinner.
The RIPPLE research group at KU Leuven, where some of the seeds for this project were initially planted and with whom I enjoy continued affiliation, also deserves thanks. MPhil supervision by Helder De Schutter, the joint seminars of Toon Braeckman and Tim Heysse, and subsequent RIPPLE events have been especially influential in this context.
Among the EUI administration, I wish to thank in particular Monika Rzemieniecka for diligently taking care of requirements related to the organisational side of this dissertation. Thanks also to all the library staff at the EUI for creating a great atmosphere in which to
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work. Peter Kennealy is conspicuous by the fact that I never had to contact him in search of absent resources – exemplifying his great effort to meet SPS researchers’ needs – while Tom Burke’s pronounced openness for consultation to all members of the EUI is much valued.
Last but not least, I mention those who were part of the road in other ways. The support of my mother, Phyllis, has been as immense as it has always been. Words can’t do justice to this. The greatest gift of the EUI has been the opportunity to meet my partner, Erin, who has contributed in too many ways to list here. The North Dublin Critical Forum (i.e., my brothers Tom, Paul and Micheál) have not waned in their support and continue to be a major source of critical engagement on all things. To them, and the rest of my family who have been a great wellspring of support, I give my thanks.
Finally, the fondest of thanks to Chiara, Eliska, Francisco, Hugo, Joldon, Leo, Lorenzo and Stefano. These friends and many other friendly faces at the EUI will be missed, not least because of how they helped to transform this “lonely” road into something else entirely.
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List of Figures
0.1 The Political System
2.1: The Dualist Model of Political Representation
2.2: The Tripartite Model of Democratic Representation (where Represented = Passive
Auxiliary Audience)
3.1: A Conceptual Map of the EU
3.2: Direct and Indirect Sources of Legitimacy in the EU
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List of Abbreviations
CSO – Civil Society Organisation ECI – European Citizens’ Initiative EU – European Union
EP – European Parliament
EWM – Early Warning Mechanism IGC – Intergovernmental Congress
LFT – Lingual franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems MEP – Member of the European Parliament
MLK – Martin Luther King Jr. N-VA – New Flemish Alliance QMV – Qualified Majority Voting SVP – Swiss People’s Party TEU – Treaty on European Union
TFEU – Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union VNV – Flemish National Union
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Abstract
This dissertation aims to arrive at a model of democratic legitimacy for the European Union. There is, however, a strain of thought pre-dominant in political theory since the nineteenth century that doubts the capacity of political systems constituted by multiple public spheres to have sustainable democratic systems. This view is referred to here as the lingua franca thesis
on sustainable democratic systems (LFT). It states that, in the absence of a common language
for political debate, democracy cannot function well in the long-term as citizens existing in distinctive public spheres will inevitably come to have diverging preferences that cannot be satisfactorily resolved by a collective democratic process. Poor quality democratic institutions, as well as acute demands to divide the political system (through devolution or secession) so that state and society become more congruent, are predicted by this thesis.
To arrive at a model of democratic legitimacy for the EU, in light of the challenge presented by the LFT, three major steps are taken. Part One attempts to arrive at an account of democratic legitimacy as a realistic ideal for modern political systems. Understanding democracy as a system which strives to maximise citizens’ equal opportunities for control over the decisions to which they are subject, the maximisation of electoral and direct voting opportunities for citizens is recommended, subject to certain practical constraints. Importantly, democratically legitimate institutions are identified as having important external effects, which amount to more than just the peaceful resolution of conflict. Centripetal
democracy is the idea that legitimate democratic institutions set in motion forms of citizen
practice and representative behaviour that serve as powerful drivers of demos-formation. In the second part of this dissertation, an effort is made to both classify and normatively assess the EU. As a political system the EU is taken to be a demoi-cracy, or a democracy of democracies, whereby the demoi of the member states take sovereign precedence over the European demos constituting the citizens of Europe as a whole. While citizen’s control over their respective governments’ roles in EU decision-making is seen to have significant shortfalls, the major democratic deficiencies are detected in citizens’ control over actors located exclusively at the European level. Overall, the absence of voting opportunities directly connecting citizens to European power ensures that the EU is not controlled by its citizens in a way that is commensurate with the power it wields.
If the EU is to democratise, it must be capable of dealing with the dynamics predicted by the LFT. Part Three of this dissertation analyses the sustainability of democracy in two political systems that bear striking resemblances to the EU, namely Belgium and Switzerland. Like the EU, these are multilevel and multilingual political systems attempting to organise themselves in a democratic fashion. Belgium proves to be a near perfect case for corroborating the LFT, its linguistic communities finding it increasingly difficult to coexist in one democratic community. Switzerland, by contrast, has managed to produce one of the most democratically legitimate political systems in the modern world, despite being fractured into linguistically distinct public spheres. As my conception of centripetal democracy predicts, however, the Swiss success in integrating the public spheres within one political system is in no small part related to the arrangement of its democratic institutions.
That being said, there are certain conditions that made the development of centrifugal forces more likely and centripetal democracy less likely in Belgium than in Switzerland. In Part Four, where I finally derive a model of democratic legitimacy for the EU, it is demonstrated that while many of the conditions that made centrifugal forces so strong in Belgium are not (or not yet) present in the EU, the conditions for the development of a legitimate democratic process are also generally lacking. This is especially true when it comes to the introduction of direct democracy at Union level, although there may be fewer obstacles to making European institutions more electorally accountable.
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I Opening Remarks
For most of its near sixty year existence the European Union (EU) has accumulated substantial governing powers without receiving much democratic input from citizens. Such observations have sustained decades of debate among academics and the upper echelons of European institutions in which the legitimate basis of the EU’s long-growing influence has been under question. Yet so long as citizens perceived the EU as benign or even as having a generally positive impact on their welfare, these legitimacy concerns only occasionally found resonance in daily national debates. Enter the financial crisis and the EU is no longer thought to be delivering the goods. Over the last number of years citizens from across Europe have been pointedly asking key questions of legitimacy that strike to the core of the European project: What is Europe anyway? Who is making the decisions, and for whom? Why should these decisions be obeyed? In short, the financial crisis has exposed the EU’s purported legitimacy gap to the popular mind.
This gap cannot be unseen and, despite signs of an economic recovery in the EU, it is reasonable to conjecture that the long-term future of this political system will in part depend upon its ability to improve on its democratic credentials. This dissertation is an attempt to better understand the problems of and prospects for democratic legitimacy in the EU. Methodologically, my approach may be described as comparative politics in the service of applied political theory. That is to say, by comparing the EU with political systems that face structurally similar challenges (Belgium and Switzerland), I aim to present a realistic ideal of democratic legitimacy for the EU. This involves first outlining a theory of democratic legitimacy, which is then used to analyse my three case studies, with a view to finally drawing lessons from this analysis for the future democratic development of the EU.
Before providing a more detailed overview of the structure and content of this dissertation, it is first necessary to outline in greater depth the central problematic and my comparative approach. The next section presents the problematic, which comes in the form of what may be termed the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (II). Following this, I present my comparative approach by providing an account of how the idea of democratic legitimacy fits in to the political systems framework that is designed for and well-suited to the study of comparative politics (III). The final section presents an overview of the structure and core arguments of the dissertation (IV).
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II The Problematic
Philippe Van Parijs adopts the uncontroversial view that democracy requires some kind of demos or unified people if it is to be sustainable in the long-run. He also endorses the increasingly prevalent position that a thin civic identity based on common commitment to political principles and projects is sufficient to constitute a democratic people, eschewing the historically popular notion that a demos must be reinforced by cultural homogeneity in the form of common ethnicity or religious commitment (Van Parijs 2011: 28-30). What he seeks to revive, however, is the 19th Century thesis famously put forward by John Stuart Mill (1862: 310) that the functioning of democracy requires a linguistically unified demos. The reason for this, according to Van Parijs, is that a lingua franca is essential as a fluent means of discourse by which citizens can communicate with one another and the governing authorities in the pursuit of public policy. Indeed, a lingua franca does not even require that all citizens have the same first language, merely that they have sufficient knowledge of one language in which communication can easily proceed. In Van Parijs’ words (2011: 28), the emergence of a demos is ‘facilitated, indeed made possible, by the availability of a common language’. And, in a phrase, there can be ‘[n]o viable democracy without a linguistically unified demos’ (Van Parijs 2000: 236).
What is fundamentally at stake in this last proposition is the contention that multilingual contexts give rise to distinct public spheres of political discourse, such that the vast majority of citizens in the respective public spheres will access media and engage politically in their own language. Different public spheres, in other words, tend to go through different processes of opinion formation. But why should this be a problem? Underlying Van Parijs’ assertion are several powerful presuppositions about the logic according to which democratic relations in multilingual political systems proceed.
First, it is assumed that the existence of linguistically distinct public spheres will serve to create different identities and corresponding socio-political cultures. Second, insofar as the public spheres do not undergo the same processes of opinion formation or adopt the same socio-political norms and styles, there is a high risk that different political preferences will emerge. Third, under these circumstances, political conflict will become crystallised around such differences between the linguistically demarcated groups, so that they each feel constrained by one another in pursuit of their own preferences. Finally, the inability of members from the distinctive public spheres to find satisfaction at the central governing level will weaken the demos by leading to demands among the public spheres for increasing autonomy from the central authority, to the limit of complete secession.
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As Jan Erk (2008) observes in his study of deeply divided political systems, there is an ineluctable tendency for state and society to become congruent over time as people with the same socio-political culture wish to govern themselves with as little concession as possible to other political communities. The case of linguistically divided public spheres, as the above outlined logic suggests, is a forerunning example of this phenomenon. Historically speaking, this view appears to receive broad support insofar as nation-building in the nineteenth century standardly involved linguistic homogenisation in democratising states across the Western world, while acute political conflict has been a mainstay of the political scene in many political systems constituted by linguistically distinct public spheres.
The word “viable” is a key qualifier in Van Parijs’ above statement. There are two possible ways of interpreting this term, one that makes his claim an absolutist thesis and another that makes it a matter of degree. Given the continued existence of multilingual democratic states, like Canada, the absolutist understanding whereby all multilingual democracies are seen as ultimately doomed to failure seems highly doubtful. In fact, despite being a proponent of the view that democracy requires a unified public sphere, Van Parijs (2013: 61) is committed to the long-term viability of his native multilingual Belgium. Clearly therefore, his thesis should be understood as a matter of degree, not predicting the eventual demise of all linguistically divided political systems but rather insisting upon their inability to form a demos strong enough to undergird robustly democratic practices. In other words, the lot of multilingual democracies is to constantly grapple with identity crises and the democratic difficulties of dealing with distinct processes of opinion formation. While this does not guarantee the eventual failure of the system, it is expected to make them particularly vulnerable to the emergence and persistence of acutely conflicting, disintegrative and secessionist tendencies that stymie democratic institutions.
To avoid confusion between the absolutist and relative interpretations of Van Parijs’ hypothesis, we should give the latter its own explicit formulation since it is with this interpretation that the dissertation is concerned. Let us henceforward refer to the relative interpretation of Van Parijs’ view as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems, or the LFT for short. It can be briefly stated as follows: “The less linguistically unified a political community, the more problematic is the establishment and sustainability of a democratically legitimate regime.” Put differently, the less likely it is that two people
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chosen at random can communicate with one another in a political community, the more problematic it will be to have well-functioning and sustainable democratic institutions.1
From this construction of the LFT, two closely related questions emerge. First, if the LFT is a matter of degree, then there must be circumstances extraneous to the supposed dynamics of distinctive public spheres in a democratic system that make the system more or less likely to succumb to these dynamics. Stated otherwise, are there forces that may mitigate some of the key factors leading to the more extreme consequences predicted by the LFT? Second, if it is possible to mitigate the consequences expected by the LFT, can it then be overcome entirely or neutralised under certain conditions?
While the attempt to answer these questions will be relevant to any multilingual political system, this dissertation is concerned with the EU, which is fragmented into several dozen public spheres of political debate. As a relatively young political system, with simultaneous claims and aspirations to democratic legitimacy and supranational identity formation, the EU may not serve as an especially good case for testing the main claims of the LFT. On the contrary, the extent to which we accept the validity of the LFT and its presuppositions will have a major impact on how we understand the problems and prospects for the achievement of democratic legitimacy in the EU. Should this political system find itself in an especially poor position with regard to the LFT, there may be low lying limits to the improvement of European democracy.
In order to test the LFT in a way that is relevant to the EU, I propose to assess the democratic performance of political systems that have had to confront the LFT and which bear closest resemblance to the EU qua political system. That is to say, I have not chosen my cases on the basis of population size or socioeconomic development, but on the resemblance of the cases to the EU’s political organisation. In my view, this narrows the range of instructive cases down to multilevel and multilingual political systems with claims to democratic legitimacy. On the basis of these criteria several contemporary cases immediately come to mind, most prominently Belgium, Canada, India and Switzerland, though there are others worthy of attention. A more complete analysis would involve comparing the EU with at least these political systems, yet the limits of this dissertation dictate the choice of two.
Though I have explored the possibility of comparing several other cases, an initial review of the literature suggested that Belgium and Switzerland would produce especially valuable comparative insights as the former has historically struggled in dealing with the
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existence of distinctive public spheres whereas the latter appears to have met with more success. Canada would seem to be a mediate case that has been in many ways more successful than Belgium yet less successful than Switzerland in managing multilingualism. India, however, is still developing as a democracy and increasingly effective at making the LFT less relevant by making both English and Hindi strong lingua franca contenders. Indeed, should the dynamics expected by the LFT drastically limit the prospects of democratic legitimacy in the EU, observing the Indian case may become especially valuable.
III Justifying the Comparative Approach
My theoretical approach formulated in the first part of this dissertation is concerned with providing an account of democratic legitimacy. What I wish to do now is substantiate my assumption that the EU, Belgium and Switzerland can be systematically compared from the perspective of a theory of democratic legitimacy. This means specifying what I mean by the term political system – which I have already been using above to describe my case studies – and how the idea of democratic legitimacy relates to this wider concept. According to David Easton (1957: 385), a political system is the totality of actions related to the making of binding decisions for a given society and has three main components. Political community he
defines as those who are included in the political system and are aware of themselves and others as being so included (Easton 1965: 177). Though Easton speaks about the political community in terms of persons, his insistence that the political system framework applies to both states and the international arena suggests that territorial units like nation-states themselves can be equally regarded as constituting the political community of a political system (Easton 1965: 172). The regime is simply the set of rules and values articulating the institutions of authority and setting the norms of daily political life (Easton 1965: 193), whereas the government is just those personnel who happen to occupy positions in the institutions of authority at a given time (Easton 1965: 212).
From the general environment, encompassing all social relations, emerge wants. Some of these are converted into political demands that are brought to the attention of the authorities with sufficient support by members of the political community. These are the
inputs of the political system. In response to the multiplicity of demands, the authorities
produce outputs in the form of policies or decisions according to fixed procedures. Such outputs are designed to change the environment in some way, generating fresh ground for a
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new set of wants to emerge. This basic outline of the political system is graphically represented below.2
Figure 0.1: The Political System
For Easton, a key question in political science concerns the manner in which a political system can achieve both short-term and long-term support, identifying legitimacy as one of the most important ingredients in the generation of such support. Some degree of legitimacy is achieved, on his view, when the political system conforms to its members’ sense of rightness in political matters concerning the composition of the political community, the values of the regime and the performance of the day’s government (Easton 1965: 278). Such an “empirical” conception of legitimacy will be of peripheral concern to this dissertation, which thinks about legitimacy in normative terms. From a normative perspective, legitimacy cannot be equated with a political community’s sense of rightness but must refer to objective principles that are independent of whether or not they are supported by a particular group. Although theoretically extremely important, this distinction between empirical and normative understandings of legitimacy may not have material consequences for this dissertation: one of my central arguments entails the premise that the achievement of high standards of democratic legitimacy will lead to strong levels of support for the political system, all other things being equal.
Several authors, claiming to focus on legitimacy from a normative viewpoint, have helpfully used the political systems approach to distinguish between three kinds of legitimacy: input, output and throughput (Schmidt 2013; cf. Scharpf 1999). Input legitimacy refers to the degree of openness and responsiveness of the institutions of authority towards
2 A reader familiar with Easton’s work may wonder at why I have not chosen to replicate his now famous
graphic of the political system (Easton 1957: 384). I believe what I have presented differs from Easton’s representation only in form and not in substance, with the advantage of adding clarity. Easton’s classic graphic does not distinguish between the political community and the institutions of authority. This runs the risk of misinterpretations, including the confusion that the political system is somehow equivalent to the authorities and exclusive of the political community.
Institutions of Authority Political Community Inputs Outputs Environment Environment
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members of the political community and their demands; throughput legitimacy has to do with the level of transparency, accountability and inclusiveness of decision-making among the institutions of authority; and output legitimacy simply concerns the quality of public policies in terms of serving the common good.
A complete account of legitimacy per se, while highly desirable, is beyond the scope of this dissertation. As already indicated, I intend to focus on democratic legitimacy, which is only one part of the total legitimacy puzzle. While democratic legitimacy will in important respects rely upon achieving a certain minimum level of throughput and output legitimacy, we may justifiably associate it with input legitimacy insofar as democracy is understood as a mode of decision-making that regulates the relationship between citizens and the institutions of authority. In other words, democracy is not conceived here as a full theory of institutional design that specifies how institutions ought to interact with one another, nor is it thought of in terms of its ability to produce good and just outcomes. It is, first and foremost, a way of ensuring that citizens have power over those who have power over them.
This understanding of democracy will be made clearer and further justified in the first part of the dissertation. Yet, given this conception of democracy, certain limitations to the study quickly come to the fore. In particular, by providing only a partial account of legitimacy, I am unable to weigh up claims of output or throughput legitimacy when and if they come into conflict with the values of democracy. Certainly, I do not take a position on whether or not democracy or justice should take precedence over one another in some or all circumstances. My working assumption, predominant in modern political theory, is that democracy and justice are much closer to being bedfellows than feuding lords. Thus, however the values of justice and democracy stack up against one another in a wider theory of legitimacy, I expect the latter to play a very important role. Any democratic prescriptions directed towards the EU in this dissertation may in principle be challenged or mitigated by considerations of justice or output legitimacy, but this should not make these prescriptions irrelevant by any means. In fact, democracy will always have recourse to what John Rawls (2005) refers to as the burdens of judgment, namely the difficulty of determining beyond a certain limit what is right or just due to complexity or normal weaknesses in human reason. Given this fact alone, there is much to be said for democracy as the fairest process available for arriving at an answer to contentious issues of justice.
From this account, we can more clearly see the terms of comparison for my three case studies: Belgium, Switzerland and the EU. The nature of the political community and regime for each case will need to be described. Special attention will be paid to the question of how
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language shapes these respective components of the political system and their relationship to one another. Such descriptions will be crucial for carrying out accurate comparative work, allowing us to identify the similarities and differences between the case studies in their basic political make up. My descriptions of the cases will also inform how they are democratically assessed since any such account will primarily proceed in terms of the power relationship between the respective political communities and regimes.
Comparative analyses of the EU with federal states are not new and seem to be increasing for a variety of research questions. Yet it is only in a handful of instances that Belgium and/or Switzerland are compared with the EU from the perspective of democratic legitimacy. Universally, these contributions are article-length and tend to focus only on specific aspects of democratic legitimacy or institutional reform.3 This dissertation is the first in-depth analysis of democratic legitimacy in multilevel and multilingual political systems, designed to arrive at a general model of democratic legitimacy for the EU.
IV Overview of the Dissertation
My aims in this dissertation are to i) identify the conditions under which democratic legitimacy is most likely to suffer from the logic of the LFT ii) attempt to discover whether or not it is possible to overcome the LFT without establishing a lingua franca and iii) assess the prospects for attaining democratic legitimacy in the EU by determining the degree to which it is limited by the logic of the LFT. The project is divided into four parts.
In Part One, Democratic Legitimacy and Centripetal Democracy, I set out an account of democratic legitimacy and explain the mechanisms by which it is expected to contribute towards demos-formation. Studying democracy in the EU is a popular subject these days. With few exceptions (e.g. Lord 2004; Eriksen 2009), however, scholars spend little time laying out in advance their precise understanding of democracy. This is not the result of any scholarly vice, but merely due to the fact that most contributors generally subscribe to an already worked out theory of democracy, taking ready-made indicators of democratic legitimacy from the political theory literature. Such a sensible strategy does not require much justification, though dedicating a full two chapters of this dissertation to the heavily rehearsed theme of democratic legitimacy does. I have three reasons.
3 For Belgium-EU comparison on democratic legitimacy, see Van Parijs (2000) and Sinardet and Bursens
(2014). For Belgium-Switzerland comparison on democratic legitimacy, see Stojanovic (2009). For Switzerland-EU comparison on democratic legitimacy, see Lacey (2014a). For Belgium-Switzerland-EU comparison on democratic legitimacy, see Papadopoulos and Magnette (2010).
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First, as I argue in Chapter One, contemporary political theory has overlooked two phenomena that are central to providing a realistic ideal of democracy. On one hand, much of the literature gives voting a very restricted place in their theories, believing it to be capable of serving only a very limited function in both actual and ideal democracies. I take issue with this, claiming that the act of voting in all democratic systems presupposes a voting space (or set of rules and procedures to govern the vote) that structure the entire process of opinion formation and thereby serves as the centre-piece of any democratic system. On the other hand, it is widely agreed that the size of modern political systems and the volume and complexity of issues requires a division of political labour, yet a normative principle to regulate this reality has not been derived. What I call the democratic difference principle is designed precisely for this task. My conception of democratic legitimacy can be briefly summarised as prescribing the maximisation of citizen control over the decisions to which they are subject through a moderate proliferation of voting spaces and the opinion formation processes they engender. In practical terms, this may be translated as the need for multilevel electoral bodies and corresponding multifaceted direct democratic institutions.
Second, as I explain in Chapter Two, recent work on the nature of political representation has forcefully argued that representation is constitutive of politics and serves to structure power relations in all political systems. As such, any theory of democracy must at the same time be a theory of political representation. While this literature insists that representation constitutes democracy, just as any other political system, it does not elaborate upon how democracy conditions representation once it is has been constituted by representation. I argue that the manner in which democracy organises representation, through the voting space and democratic difference principle, distinguishes it from all other political systems. The core task of this chapter is to outline an account of legitimate democratic representation. Conceptual resources developed over the course of Part One will, I believe, help us to more accurately describe and normatively assess the democratic systems under scrutiny in the remainder of the dissertation.
There is also, however, a third reason for my extended focus on the theme of democratic legitimacy and that is to better understand the manner in which it may contribute to demos-formation. On my view, presented at the end of Chapter Two, democratic legitimacy is more than simply the peaceful resolution of conflict. It is a centripetal force whose integrative effects reach beyond the virtues of peaceful conflict resolution. Centripetal and centrifugal forces are to be understood in this dissertation as limited to structural dynamics, rather than singular events, that push citizens towards a more or less centralised
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political identification. Contrary to centrifugal forces, which encourage citizens to move away from mutual identification with their common institutions of authority and with one another as part of the same political community, centripetal forces are understood as those dynamics which strengthen identification with the regime and political community. As this dissertation argues, through its procedures and the kind of political representation it encourages, democratic legitimacy has an integrative effect on conflicting parties by winning their common commitment to the democratic process. As a result, from the perspective of the LFT, the question arises as to whether or not the centripetal forces of democracy can cope with the centrifugal forces of linguistically divided public spheres.
Part Two of this study is entitled Democratic Legitimacy in the EU. Unlike my other two case studies, which take up one chapter each, this theme deserves two chapters. The reasons for this is that a) the EU is the main focus of this dissertation and so requires more in depth analysis and b) it is much more difficult to descriptively identify the nature of the EU’s political community and regime, which in turns makes a normative assessment of the relationship between these two components of the political system more difficult. Chapter Three is dedicated to describing the EU, which is widely considered to be a political system unlike any other. In fact, the EU is identified as the only existing demoi-cracy, defined as a political system where three main actors predominate – supranational institutions, member state institutions and citizens – and in which the territorially and linguistically demarcated member state demoi take sovereign precedence over the supranational demos.
Demoi-cracy, I contend, is not in opposition to democracy but rather indicates that a democratic assessment of the EU must have a double focus: the power relationship between the supranational institutions and the citizens and the member states on the one hand, and the power relationship between the member state institutions and their respective citizens on the other. In Chapter Four, a democratic assessment of European demoi-cracy is carried out. While there are important standards of democratic legitimacy which the EU at least partially meets, my assessment concludes that the EU is a political system with some major shortcomings in this regard. The degree to which citizens can directly control European institutions or their governments’ behaviour with regard to these institutions is lacking in important respects.
The prospects for the EU to overcome its major democratic deficits depend in large part on whether or not its circumstances are amenable to dealing with the LFT. To determine this, a democratic analysis of multilingual Belgium and Switzerland is expected to be highly instructive and constitutes the theme of Part Three, Confronting the Lingua Franca Thesis:
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Belgium and Switzerland Compared. As Chapter Five explains, Belgium follows the logic expected by the LFT to an astonishing degree. In this political system, the existence of linguistically divided public spheres has in large part undermined the ability of this system to achieve high standards of democratic legitimacy and the centripetal forces that this engenders. In particular, we find that political conflict has crystallised around a linguistic cleavage in Belgium, which is largely responsible for disintegrative tendencies, including the division of the party and media system along linguistic lines. In an effort to avoid political conflict, a relatively non-participatory form of decision-making has been instituted (i.e. consociationalism). This, however, has for the most part been ineffective in stemming the tide of powerful political demands for decentralisation of the state as well as more extreme cries for secession at the highest level of government.
The case of Switzerland, presented in Chapter Six, lies in stark contrast to Belgium since the linguistic cleavage hardly became a major issue there whereas the linguistic division of public spheres has not impeded the development of advanced democratic practices in the former. A minor degree of linguistic conflict, the federal structure of the party and media system and a high degree of organised democratic participation by citizens seem to go a long way towards allowing Switzerland to cope with the LFT in such a successful manner. Of particular note here is Switzerland’s long tradition of direct democracy which serves as a prime example of how powerful democracy can be as a centripetal force. The regular act of voting together, on issues proposed by the government or the citizens themselves, allows citizens from the various public spheres to maintain a temporally synchronised set of common political concerns around which their respective political debates are structured. Switzerland’s answer to the LFT is surprising. Rather than attempting to minimise citizen participation in the face of linguistic division, it has instead done a great deal to maximise participation, demonstrating the potential for the centripetal power of democracy to undermine the centrifugal forces predicted by the LFT.
My comparative analysis of Belgium and Switzerland recognises their historical idiosyncrasies in such a way that it becomes clear why one case found it more difficult to deal with the democratic and integrative challenges posed by the LFT. These factors are enumerated in the Conclusion to Chapter Three, highlighting certain opposing tendencies in the historical development of the political community and regime of both cases. They explain why linguistically charged centrifugal forces were especially likely to develop strongly in Belgium while the institutions required to activate the powerful centripetal forces of democracy were especially unlikely to develop. The reverse is similarly demonstrated for the
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Swiss case. Moreover, the comparative analysis demonstrates that here is little chance of the logic expected by the LFT being eliminated altogether. Despite its success in dealing with this problematic, Switzerland continues to be haunted by the persistency with which the logic of the LFT attempts to take hold. As a result, this dissertation proves that the LFT must be taken seriously at all times by multilingual societies, but that it is nevertheless capable of being managed. This is especially true under certain favourable circumstances affecting the evolution of the political community and regime.
The results of this Belgium/Switzerland comparison bring me directly to Part Four, Modelling Democratic Legitimacy for the EU, composed of a single concluding chapter. While there are certain idiosyncratic complexities to the EU case, I maintain that this political system boasts only some of the unfavourable conditions for confronting the LFT that we find in Belgium and that these could in principle be remedied. My central contention is that by following the Swiss case and becoming more democratic the EU may be able to cope well with this problematic. Stated otherwise, the LFT should be seen as less of an obstacle to democratic legitimacy in the EU and more of a problem to be dealt with by the achievement of democratic legitimacy. In this final chapter, I construct an ideal demoi-cratic model of the EU with an indication of the required steps to get there, including the formation of a European party system competing for executive control and the development of direct democratic mechanisms designed in a manner appropriate to the kinds of legislation at stake. Given the political difficulties with instituting such an ideal, however, a range of more modest goals will be discussed. While such piecemeal improvements may be all that is politically realisable in the foreseeable future, their limitations for dealing with the LFT and the EU’s legitimacy gap will be manifest. Improving Europe’s democratic credentials may be an all or (almost) nothing affair. Presently, I turn to Part One.
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Part One
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Introduction to Part One
The aim of this first part is to provide an account of democratic legitimacy and explain its capacity to act as a centripetal force among conflicting groups. This will provide the theoretical framework with which I analyse my three case studies in Parts Two and Three. Chapter One asks the plain question, what is democratic legitimacy? In answering this question, the long tradition of political theory that has preoccupied itself with such matters obviously cannot be ignored, yet it cannot be reviewed either. Theories of democracy have been refined to two main types by the latter part of the twentieth century, namely competitive and deliberative theories, and so it is to these that I address myself. Rather than arguing for the merits of one against the other, or seeking an entirely new theory of democracy, I attempt to provide an improved articulation of democracy by highlighting two concepts commonly overlooked by these schools of thought. These are the voting space that structures public discourse and the democratic difference principle that regulates the division of labour in a political system among the rulers and the ruled. With the help of these concepts, I hope to provide a general account of democracy that can go beyond the excessive realism of competitive democrats and the untoward idealism typical of many deliberative democrats, leading to a realistic ideal of democratic legitimacy.
The account I present here is somewhat formalistic, ignoring the life force that animates political systems, namely the activities of representatives in articulating the political world. Chapter Two is a second pass through the democratic terrain with a view to understanding the role of political representation in a theory of democratic legitimacy. It attempts to determine what makes acts of political representation democratically legitimate, while identifying the possible ways in which democracy can go wrong through certain kinds of representative practices. This account of legitimate democratic representation suggests that numerous aspects of a well-functioning democracy can lead to more than just the resolution of social conflict, specifically by contributing to the formation of a common democratic identity among members of the political community. Indeed, by the end of this chapter, a central contention of this dissertation will become clear, namely that the closer a political system is to achieving democratic legitimacy the more powerful its centripetal forces on political integration are expected to be.
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Chapter One
Democratic Process and Democratic Purpose
In Pursuit of a Realistic Ideal
I A Realistic Democratic Ideal
All definitions of democracy involve a purpose that is supposed to be achieved and a process or set of coordinated practices for achieving it. Two counter-posing conceptions have dominated democratic theory for the last decades: competitive democracy and deliberative democracy. For competitive democrats (e.g. Schumpeter 2003 [1943]; Bobbio 1987; Przeworski 1999; Posner 2003), the purpose of democracy is to allow citizens to peacefully rid themselves of governments and the procedure required to do this is open, regular, and competitive elections to be decided by the aggregation of popular votes. Deliberative democrats (e.g. Cohen 1997; Christiano 1997; Goodin 2003; Dryzek 2010) understand democracy as an ideal of self-rule, following the classical tradition which emphasises the terms’ etymology as power [kratos] exercised by the people [demos]. Though there are many shades of deliberative democrat, common to all is the view that self-rule is to be achieved through a continuous process of open and accessible public deliberation that aims at mutually acceptable reasons for the binding decisions that result (Gutman and Thompson 2004: 9).
Both perspectives boast a rich tradition and have a great deal to offer. Nevertheless, I believe our understanding of democracy can be improved as neither seems to strike an acceptable balance in simultaneously doing justice to the descriptive and normative aspirations of this concept. Competitive democrats fail to reconcile the real with the ideal by deriving an empirical democratic purpose for democracy from an empirical account of democratic process. Put differently, they have provided us with a thoroughgoing realist conception of democracy which has a very limited capacity for providing normative
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guidance.4 Any attempt by these authors to make prescriptive statements has been wedded to the observations that democracy operates mainly by the aggregation of votes to elect leaders where the pursuit of self-interest by citizens and representatives is paramount. The values of public debate, citizen participation and pursuit of the common good are downplayed by some while polemically denounced as normative clap-trap by others.
Deliberative democracy has a tendency to produce the exact opposite imbalance by deriving an ideal democratic process from an ideal democratic purpose. Though there are different degrees to which this is true for any given scholar, contributors have often been limited in their ability to appreciate democratic reality or make prescriptions that may be achieved by that reality. Deliberative democracy’s high demands on citizen participation and its assumptions of political competence among the population are criticised as unrealistic, to such a point that the idea of democracy becomes a chimera that will not much help us to explain or classify real-world democracies (Schumpeter 2003 [1943]: 264-6;5 Posner 2003: 143-4). Though this critique may be too harshly stated, the fact remains that the widespread capacity to deliberate well and the time and commitment required to do this has never been present in even the most well-run democracies. The more deliberative democracy ideals are disconnected from real-world politics the lower the threshold concerning the relevance of any prescriptions or criticisms it may have to offer that reality. To this we may add the criticism that deliberative democracy’s focus on deliberation as an essential condition of legitimate decision-making excludes a great deal of speech and action from the explanatory scope of deliberative theory in addition to denying such non-deliberative practices significant normative roles. My focus on voting throughout this chapter will help to illustrate this point.
A possible explanation for their apparent bias towards the ideal at the expense of the real is the fact that deliberative democrats tend to build a procedural conception of justice into their idea of democracy in advance. To clarify this, the requirement that democracy aim at mutually acceptable reasons for binding decisions is virtually identical to the primary criterion of contractarian theories of justice (Roemer 1999). In that case, we may argue that deliberative democrats tend to be looking less for a reflective equilibrium on the nature of democracy and are more concerned with understanding how democracy can be reconciled with or utilised for achieving a just society. This is to take two steps at once. What is required
4 Bernard Manin’s well-known principles of representative government (1997: 6), for instance, are not
normative principles but descriptive. His aim is to arrive at a conception of representative democracy based on the manner in which it has been enacted since the eighteenth century.
5 Though Schumpeter pre-dated the emergence of deliberative democracy by several decades, we can assume
that he would apply his critique of classical theories of democracy to deliberative democracy since the latter may be seen in many ways as the modern development of the former.
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before relating democracy and procedural justice to one another is a prior understanding of these concepts on their own terms. In this chapter, my interest is in clarifying the concept of democracy only.
What we must have is an account of democracy that is not pre-laden with deliberative assumptions but that may nevertheless provide us with a more robust normative framework than competitive democrats are capable of offering. Changing the expression, the goal is to present a theory of democracy that is capable of describing political reality while at the same time providing attainable normative guidance to that reality. Such a realistic ideal is impossible to achieve if both the purpose and process of democracy are together understood primarily in either real or ideal terms. My proposal is to present an account that places an empirical emphasis on democratic process and a normative concentration on democratic purpose.
I begin with an articulation of democratic process. It is an empirical account, not in the sense of being based on extensive data detailing the workings of modern political systems commonly referred to as democracies, but by being sensitive to broad political realities with which competitive democrats and their critics are normally concerned. Summarily, the democratic process may be defined as a competitive decision-making process that operates according to a principle of equality embodied in the rules specifying a voting space (compound) that structures a public sphere of discursive participation (II). Following this, I provide a conception of democratic purpose. This is a normative conception, not in the sense of providing a complete account of political legitimacy or the ultimate moral foundations of democracy, but as a way of justifying democratic process while at the same time providing the ideal for which it should strive. Reflecting on the idealism historically associated with democracy, I attempt to identify the democratic purpose and the action guiding principles of democratic process that it engenders. In short, the democratic purpose is defined as an ideal of self-rule that involves maximising the control of individuals over the political authorities to which they are subject (III). This gives rise to 1) the principle of democratic equality 2) the democratic difference principle and 3) the principle of maximum voting opportunities. I conclude by demonstrating how my account of democracy navigates between and differs from some of the main conceptual oppositions and contrasts defining contemporary democratic theory (IV).
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II An Account of Democratic Process
Any account of democratic process must give some place to the ideas of voting and discourse. This statement may be uncontroversial enough and it is something on which we will find competitive and deliberative democrats in broad agreement. Once we get into details, however, their different understandings of these concepts and the role and relevance they give to each becomes immediately clear.
For competitive democrats, voting in competitive elections is the definitive act of democracy since it is the procedure that allows for the aggregation of individual preferences to select desired leaders. The role of discourse is minimised in the sense of being seen as necessary primarily at election time and between elites so that citizens may make a judgment at the polling booth. Competitive democrats are widely criticised for this account on the grounds that there are many ways in which citizens can and do participate in democratic politics both during and between election periods (Schmitter and Lynn Karl 1991: 78; Dryzek 2010: 37; Urbinati 2005: 198).6 Individual citizens and representatives of citizen groups or movements have proven their capacity to be highly vocal and influential in democratic politics. Indeed, the use of direct democratic instruments that are more or less entrenched in many democratic societies are completely ignored by competitive democrats. Failing to account for these not unfamiliar participatory phenomena represents a particular shortcoming for a theory that claims to be realist.
Deliberative democrats tend to be suspicious of voting because it is not aimed at the consensus required for producing decisions on the basis of mutually justifiable reasons. They argue that voting allows people to put their weight behind political power that may be contrary to the public good without being required to justify their support to anyone. Moreover, it is objected that voting takes personal preferences as fixed, bypassing the possibility for individuals to be persuaded by the better argument. Reluctantly, however, deliberative democrats have increasingly recognised that voting may be necessary on occasions when deliberative avenues have been exhausted or agreement simply cannot be reached within reasonable time limits (Mansbridge, Bohman, Chambers, et al. 2010: 85; Christiano 2012: 28). The general scepticism about voting ignores the fact that voting has always been an integral part of democratic decision-making and not a begrudgingly endorsed second-best procedure for occasions when reaching decisions solely by deliberation is not
6 Several competitive democrats acknowledge the extra-electoral influence of citizens (Posner 2003: 195;
Przeworski 2010: 111-2), yet this has not led them to reformulate their definition of democracy as essentially elitist. This reluctance, I would argue, comes down to a desire not to insert any prescriptive participatory requirements on citizens that might begin to look too demanding.
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possible.7 Indeed, as I attempt to demonstrate later in this section, there is much more to the act of voting than either deliberative or competitive democrats recognise.
Emphasising discourse at the expense of voting, deliberative democrats agree that deliberation is the legitimate form of talk for democratic decision-making. Undeniably, we will find individuals and organised groups contributing to public debate in a manner that satisfies high normative standards of mutual justification. And, indeed, we could discover even more examples of those willing to authentically reflect on their values and interests when faced with challenging arguments. Nevertheless, we cannot discount the large role played by individuals and organisations who, through the democratic process, pursue their own self-interest at the expense of others and against the grain of better arguments. The host of factors that go into making up a political culture will determine how normalised the practice of public deliberation is over and above other forms of political discourse in a given society. Yet since the democratic process does not appear to require deliberation aimed at the common good but often involves discourse directed towards self-interest we would do better to speak of discursive participation. This is a much broader term than deliberation, designed to cover all kinds of talk in the public sphere concerned with contributing to the wider public conversation on what is to be done.
On the Idea of a Voting Space
In what follows, I attempt to provide a more convincing account of democratic process than we find in either the competitive or deliberative democracy literature. The idea of a voting
space, a phenomenon generally overlooked in democratic theory, is the key to providing an
improved understanding of democratic process. A voting space may be defined as any set of procedures that formally open up political power to the input of individual citizens through the act of voting.8 The choice of the word “space” is deliberate here, suggesting a delimited and designated opening wherein the act of voting emerges as a meaningful possibility. The reason for introducing this concept is not simply to make the point that democracy is more than just voting but rather to illustrate the more subtle observation that the act of voting itself only makes sense when a host of conditions are already in place. Though I do not elucidate all the possible rules that might animate a voting space, I identify five general categories of
7 Robert Goodin (2008) represents a rare deliberative democrat who wholeheartedly endorses voting as both a
necessary and normatively sound aspect of democracy.
8 Elsewhere, I have given a similar definition of this concept as ‘the totality of procedural devices…’ (Lacey
2014a: 64). The difference is that I previously understood the concept of voting space as a term that could cover both singular and plural phenomena. Now a voting space refers only to singular phenomena. What I refer to later as a voting space compound, by contrast, denotes a plural phenomenon.
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rules that are essential for structuring this space for voting. As we shall see, there is great flexibility within these categories for how a voting space may be legally articulated and procedurally arranged.
Notice that voting has not been confined to election, as competitive democrats are wont to do in outlining their conception of democratic process, but is understood broadly enough to include instruments of direct democracy. This leads us to the first general category of any given voting space, namely that it states in advance about what it is possible to vote upon. That is to say, it identifies the kind of subject that must be decided upon and this subject may be individual candidates and/or a political party in elections or a specific issue when exercises of direct democracy are at stake. In specifying the subject of a given vote, the voting space must at the same time articulate the institutions to which candidates and/or parties are to be elected or the possible range of issues that may be put up for direct vote. For example, the institution may be a parliament or presidential office in the case of election while there could be restrictions on the kind of issues that may be put directly to the people. The voting space also identifies when particular kinds of votes can and must take place. In both electoral and direct voting spaces, there will be occasions when a vote is required and others when there will be some flexibility as to when or whether the vote actually occurs.
One of the most intriguing features of a voting space is that it specifies who may vote, and in the case of elections, who may run as a candidate. Essentially, the voting space determines criteria for both active and passive voting rights and thereby has a major role in setting the terms of democratic participation. Democratic communities will have more or less restrictive rules determining the voting rights of citizens, citizen residents, citizen non-residents, the mentally disabled, the incarcerated, etc. The rules of who may vote and run as a candidate will be further specified by the idea of district or constituency, that is, where particular individuals may have their votes aggregated and seek electoral office. There are a host of ways in which the idea of district will be more or less relevant to the act of voting. In some instances, there will only be one district and therefore only one context in which to exercise passive and active electoral rights (e.g. a by-election). More often there will be several voting districts, which may be purely administrative or of substantive importance. In the former case individuals can be assigned to a particular voting district for no other reason that the efficient management of the vote, whereas in the latter instance there may be rules specifying how many candidates a district can elect to an institution or how much weight the votes of a district may be given in deciding the outcome of a direct democratic vote.
